Many of us started blogging to chronicle our lives, or share a hobby, or just as an outlet for our thoughts, without giving monetization any thought. There are many ways to make money from your blogging: through affiliate marketing, your own product, ads, sponsorship, etc. Today I’ll share with you how I made a bit over $1000 in a month with Linqia.

What Is Linqia And How Can I Make Money With It?

As I mentioned above, one of the ways you can make money with your blog is through sponsored posts. You can find these by reaching out to brands on your own, or by signing up with an influencer network. Linkia connects influencers (that’s us, bloggers) with brands. What does that do for brands?

increase awareness about their products

launch a product

grow their audience

increase sales

This is where you come in: if you have the right audience for a brand, you can work together for mutual benefit.

Linqia is a pay per click (PPC) netwok, which means you make as much money as you are able to drive traffic to the brand during a specific time frame. I first heard of Linqia about a year ago, and dismissed it, because I thought I could never send enough traffic to make it worthwhile.

But I was wrong! I applied some time in November and was accepted into the program in December. I also got my first campaign in December. I’ve since applied for a second account (for another site) and been accepted in it as well. I’ve done 2 campaigns in this second account in the past 2 months and made over $1000 in the last month.

Do I qualify to work with Linqia?

They do have some criteria you need to meet before you can be accepted, but it’s not hard. When you go to the sign up page, there’s a pop-up that will ask you a few questions before you can apply. Here’s a screen short for you:

If you can take care of these requirements, go ahead and apply. Fill out your profile completely, since that’s how they’ll know what campaigns to send you. And watch your email for a reply from Linqia. Once you are approved, you should start getting invited to campaigns that fit in with your audience.

I received invitation on both of my accounts within the first month after applying. When you get an offer, you’ll need to accept it and the terms that come whit it. Make sure you read that email carefully, as you need to do some very specific things as part of your campaign (nothing too hard, but you need to make sure you can perform).

Some people didn’t get an offer for several months. If you don’t get your first campaign offer in the first 30 days after being accepted, I suggest you contact Linqia and inquire about any campaigns that fit your audience. Make sure you tell them a bit about your audience in that contact email. Be proactive for best results!

How Much Money Can I Make With Linqia?

How much money you can make depends on the size of your audience. For my first campaign on both accounts I made less than $200. You are initially offered a smaller number of clicks (clicks you need to send to the brand). Depending on how well you do, your next campaign can make you a lot more money.

Here’s an example from my second account, which is a gardening site. My first campaign had a limit of 124 clicks because of my small audience. My blog only gets around 200 visitors a day, and I have a Facebook page with about 15K followers.

I delivered those 124 clicks in the fist 2 days of the campaign (usually campaigns last about a month). But I didn’t stop promoting: I continued sharing my blog post and campaign links to my FB audience. I ended up sending 1349 visitors to the brand’s site before the end of the campaign.

Yes, I only got paid for the first 124 clicks. But 3 days after that campaign was over, I was invited to another one, from the same brand. This time they increased my visitors allowance to 737.

As you can see, how much money you make only depends on you. If you work hard at building an engaged audience, and doing what you can for your brands, you’ll be rewarded.

Linqia Has An Affiliate Program

Another way to make money with Linqia is through their affiliate program. For every person you recommend (and gets accepted) you get $5. When they finish their first campaign, you also make 15% of their earnings (one time only).

I happened to invite a blogger with a large audience, and their first campaign gave me more than $100.

So, between my own campaigns and the money from my referral, I made close to $1200 in a month.

I find it very easy to work with Linqia, and hope I gave you a glimpse into what YOU can do too.

Without consistent and healthy amounts of traffic, your blog doesn’t stand a chance of becoming profitable. It’s a simple concept to grasp, but many still struggle to attain the numbers they want. While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem, there are some general best practices every webmaster should follow to maximize their traffic numbers. Learning how to get more traffic to your blog shouldn’t be hard. Here are five simple steps you can take to increase your daily page views. Follow these tips, and you’ll be guaranteed a noticeable uptick in the traffic you receive.

How to Get More Traffic to Your Blog

Link To Your Own Content

When Google sees that a site has a lot of internal links, that helps your PageRank because it views your site as having some depth and value to offer. If you have a particular post that’s ranked highly in the search results for a certain keyword, link to that post from other posts in your blog using that same keyword as the anchor text. It’ll boost that post in particular and your website as a whole in the organic results. Do the same with other posts and their main keywords and you’ll see a significant increase in your rank overall.

Interact With Your Readers

Your job isn’t done when you post a great new article. If people react positively to your content and leave comments, you should go out of your way to respond to them and keep the conversation going. It’s always flattering when something you write inspires passion in other people. Capitalize on that momentum by making your blog a site that people remember for being more interactive than most of the others they visit throughout the week.

Ditch The Small Talk, Solve A Problem

Nobody cares about how your day wen. Instead of broadcasting your inner monologue, use your blog to give people a solution to a problem. Write a step-by-step tutorial on something you just learned how to do or give them information that’s not widely known that can save time and money. Our time is precious, and people will pay more attention to you if you cut right to the chase and deliver the goods without the extraneous commentary.

Tweak Your Title Keywords

Sometimes, a post you write gets a decent amount of search engine traffic from people who were using an entirely different keyword than you would have expected. You can see this by looking at your analytics and back-end stats, under your traffic sources section. If that’s the case, change the title of the post to include the keyword that’s getting you that traffic in the Search Engine Results Pages. It’ll boost the ranking of that article even further, bringing in even more unique hits.

Get Social

Social media has been over-hyped to some degree over the past few years. But it’s still a valuable tool when it comes to raising your profile. The key is to take a more targeted approach to attracting new readers. Don’t “friend” everyone you run across on Facebook or follow every Tom, Dick, and Harry on Twitter. Find people with similar interests, and start to build an actual community and following that matters. A hundred like-minded followers are worth more than a million who will never read your blog.

In Closing – These suggestions are easy to implement, but nonetheless quite effective when it comes to driving more readers to your website. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg and there are many other techniques which you can use to boost your blog’s search engine rankings. You probably won’t see immediate results overnight. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and if you use these optimization methods consistently they’ll begin to pay off in short order. The trick is to just keep at it. As with anything else in life, the key to success in blogging is persistence.

Nicole Rodgers has been blogging in the finance and technology industries for three years; she encourages you to create a website and start blogging today. Blogging is a great way to increase your business network and Nicole’s small business phone is constantly ringing with incoming leads for new clients. Blogging has definitely changed the way Nicole conducts business.

Facebook is growing rapidly and boasts millions of users with several millions new users each week. This makes it a ripe opportunity to use it to boost your business. Today you’ll learn how to use Facebook to promote a business.

The first step to promote your business with Facebook is to create a business profile. Facebook offers you the ability to separate your personal and professional social networking activities and offers a number of settings, which you can adjust to meet your needs.

How to Use Facebook to Promote A Business

Before you start promoting your business, make sure you figure out who your audience is. Spending time to promote your business to the wrong audience will backfire.

I recently took Rachel’s Facebook Growth Strategies Course and revived one of my pages I let go last year. I started with almost 8000 likes, and no engagement, and after 6 weeks, I have over 13000 likes and a very engaged audience (lots of of likes, shares and comments on all my posts)

Some of the things I learned:

figure out who my audience is

ways to target that audience

how often to post on my page for maximum effect

the value of a viral post and how to create one

how larger pages can benefit me, even if they aren’t directly promoting my page

schedule posts ahead of time in an organized fashion and recycle posts that did well (this will change your life!!)

Want to explode your Facebook page? Rachel is reopening this course on March 6th for 3 short days. Get on the waiting list here, and get her course as soon as it opens.

How To Use Facebook Applications For Your Business

Facebook offers a number of applications including creating and joining groups. Adding and joining groups is another way to connect with a very specific target audience. If, for example, you are a dog trainer and your market are new dog owners, you could create a group for puppy owners and share helpful tips, links and information with them.

The group function allows you to also see the groups your friends and associates are participating in so you can make the decision about whether or not it’s a group you too want to participate in.

There are a large number of applications and with Facebook continually growing new applications will be added every day.

Applications to consider include:

• Twitter – Allows you to publish your Twitter posts on Facebook.

• BlogNetwork – This application is a great way to publicize your blog and gain new followers.

• Advertising – Facebook allows you to advertise on their site and to also sell ad space on your profile/fan pages.

• Facebook Pages – A Facebook Page is a public profile that makes it possible for you to essentially create a business profile page right on the site. You can share products, sell ad space and market to your audience.

You can also invite people to like your page (you’ll learn a really new trick in Rachel’s course 😉) . Each person who liked your page is now someone you can market to directly by sending them promotions, information, downloads and so on – much like you would an opt-in list.

Want to see some proof? Take a peek at these case studies for Rachel’s course. Some of them will blow your mind!

• Mobile Facebook – allows you to use Facebook from your mobile phone. Great for sending on the fly messages but also good to remember that many people use this feature on their mobile phone and you can market to them specifically.

Facebook is an active, thriving and growing community and it’s not just for teenagers anymore. In fact, middle-aged men and women are one of the largest growing communities online and they’re a lucrative audience.

Every now and then it is good to evaluate how your marketing efforts are working with your website. Is your website doing all that it can do for you? If not, then you may want to re-evaluate your website structure. Today I’ll share 7 ways I plan to boost my online income this year.

You should ask yourself one question: is my site relevant? If you are using SEO to create page titles, tag lines and anchor text within content, then you are on the right track. But, even an informational website can do more to pay for itself and create income for your business.

7 Ways I Will Boost My Online Income This Year

Affiliate programs – Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to boost online income. You can promote products that are complementary to yours on your website. Each time someone clicks on the links, they are directed to that site. You are credited based on the way the program is set up. Choose an affiliate program with a full toolbox of aids to help with your promotion and also incentives for top sellers.

Create a newsletter – This encourages others to read and share your site. It is also one way to build your list of potential customers. Create an opt-in page where they can enter their name and email address in exchange for a free monthly newsletter in their in-box.

Use clear navigation – Include a site map so visitors can see at a glance what your site has to offer. Use buttons that clearly tell customers what action you want them to perform. This way there will be no doubt in their minds. Your buttons can be a “call to action” for affiliate programs and your own products.

Showcase your products – Create an online store or catalog where visitors can see your products and read a description before they buy. Offer deals where they can get free items for buying certain products, or referral bonuses.

FAQs page – This is where they can find out about you and your customer service. Use it to answer commonly asked questions so that you aren’t saddled with emails all containing obvious inquiries.

Guest blogging – When you blog for others, you get exposure to a new audience, and links back to your site. A win-win for everyone.

Look around – Find the sites that are the most popular in your niche and on the internet at large and see how they are using their website to maximize earnings. Try a few pages from their book and see how it works for you 😉

Of course, if you are serious about earning more online, join a mastermind group and focus! The ladies at Pajama Affiliates, Robin and Lesley have helped me focus like never before.

As an affiliate marketer, traffic is very important to my bottom line. Every post I write is carefully crafted with an SEO optimized title, beautiful images for Pinterest, and a well thought out review of my affiliate product. But that’s not enough: I want all the traffic I can get, so for the past couple years I’ve been experimenting with Facebook ads for affiliate marketing and I have a good system that can help you too 😉

So, how do I use Facebook to make affiliate sales? No, I don’t send traffic straight to the affiliate offer. I send traffic to my page where I can pre-sell 😉

How To Create Facebook Ads For Affiliate Marketing

Let’s look at how to set up a great Facebook ad that won’t cost you an arm and a leg. I usually start with an existing post that’s doing well organically. What does that mean? It depends on your niche.

I have FB pages in 2 niches, and my posts on both hover between 3.5% and 5%, with some a lot lower and an occasional 7%.

To get started, go to the ads manager here. On the top right corner, you’ll see a green button that says “Create ad”. Click on that and you’ll be taken to a screen where you’ll choose your campaign objective. You want to choose “engagement” foe our purpose here.

On the next screen, you’ll give your campaign a name.

How to create your Facebook audience

Next, it’s time to create your audience. Here, you’ll have to think who might be interested in your offer. I’m creating an ad for my gardening site, so I’m going to choose gardening and backyard for my audience.

While backyard and gardening are what my audience is interested in, it’s too broad. I need to narrow this audience, and I chose to narrow it by making sure they are also homeowners. I chose this because I know most renters need to ask their landlord for permission to dig for a garden and I’d rather target those who can make that decision without asking for permission.

Another example: let’s say you wan to target nurses. Choose nurses as your audience, but then narrow that large audience by adding nursing publications for example. This will ensure you have actual nurses, not just someone who is connected to a nurse (as a friend or family).

You also need to choose a gender (if your niche or specific offer warrants it), and an age for your audience. For my gardening page I decided to go with both men and women and chose 35 and up for age.

For the ad targeting nurses, I’d probably choose age 25 to 60 and women. Or, if your offer was for men nurses, choose men instead. Again, just make sure you think through who is your final target, and narrow your audience down with that in mind.

Save your audience for future use

If you think you’ll use this same audience for several ads, you can save this audience so you don’t need to go through the steps each time, but instead choose the audience and go onto the next step.

A little lower on this same screen, you can choose your ad’s placement. Many people leave it alone (FB recommends automatic placement), but I prefer to tweak mine. I don’t want my ads shown on Instagram, and I don’t want my ads shown in the right column on FB: I just want them in the FB feed.

How to set up your ad budget & schedule

Now it’s time to set your budget and schedule. If you’re new to FB ads, I suggest you start with no more than $5/day. I usually only spend $1 to $3 a day for each ad (I have a few going). It will take up to 72 to hours for your click price to stabilize (especially if you only spend a dollar or two), so be patient.

Do NOT stop and start your ad:every time you restart your ad, it goes back to the most expensive click first, and needs to stabilize again. If, for some reason you want to schedule your ads at specific times of the day, you can do this by setting your budget to “lifetime budget” instead of daily budget” and then clicking on “run ads on a schedule”. Then, you can choose the times you want your ad to run.

Select the post for your ad

On the next screen, you’ll be able to choose the page (if you have more than one page) and post you want to boost. Again, it’s best if the post you want to boost already has some engagement: as you see, mine had 70 reactions (likes, loves, shares) and one comment.

Click “place order” and you’re done. It could take up to 48 hours for your ad to be approved, but it’s usually a lot faster. My ad was approved instantly (not sure how they decide: sometimes it takes an hour or two for my ads to be approved, and other times they just get approved instantly, like now).

You’re ready for traffic. Rinse and repeat. Once you get going with your FB ads, please come back and let me know how it’s going!